Dee Runyan
Travel management company veteran Dee Runyan on 1 November will join Radius as senior vice president for the Americas, replacing Greg Land who took a position with IBM. Previously a consultant with KesselRun Corporate Travel Solutions, a former BCD Travel executive vice president and a manager at Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Runyan is responsible for Radius' account sales and management in the Americas, including multinational clients, as well as Radius agencies within the region. Runyan recently spoke with The Transnationalabout her new role, the importance of data, TMC competition and globalization. Excerpts follow.
What is your thinking on the global TMC models--affiliations versus outright ownership--and how they have changed during the past 10 years?
Just like with hotel companies, there are management contracts where the link is more strongly forged versus franchisees--it is similar with any of the global [TMC] networks that exist, and some do it better than others. No one network is 100 percent fully owned. The companies that work the best are those that have a common tie that binds them. When you think about global, there is an operational leg of the stool, a technology/data leg of the stool and then there is the marketing, the brand and the logistics on contracting, etc. So if I'm a customer and I like the flavor of a global company, I am not going to be as wound up if they have all those legs of the stool. If I can contract with one entity, if I can be assured that my data will be cleansed and available when it's expected ... that's a monumental task and there's only a handful of groups that are able to do it. Some of the mega [TMCs] aren't able to do it with the precision that is expected by multinational customers. The models that can fulfill all those legs of the stool are all legitimate models. Some just do some of those categories better than others. In one of my old lives, we were members of Woodside Travel Trust, the predecessor to Radius, and we left that group and picked up one of our own affiliations after that because they weren't meeting those needs. Those were the days when you just checked a box: "Can I service you in Botswana? Sure, someone in this group can help." But now our feet are held to the fire. When I looked at this new company, with Chris [Vasiliou, Radius president CEO]coming in, he has a vision and the agencies within Radius were hungry for it and have aligned with it, and they have had successes. They have a focus on the customer and have worked through the data issues. They have come up with a standard, they have report cards on agency participation and they act upon those. I need to know how the agencies are meeting these requirements. It is very proactive and totally different than what they used to be, and, frankly, they can move more quickly on some things than some of the megas.
We know the problems about disparate travel data systems, and different countries and regulations that affect data. How is Radius doing it better?
TRX was chosen as the Radius global data partner. One of the building blocks is that you have a system that has been proven. Even without TMCs, TRX has a cadre of their own clients that have bought them directly and are multinational in nature, where TRX handles the consolidation, normalization and reporting piece. Radius does the data cleansing and normalization itself and uses TRX on the bookends; they are the consolidator and the reporting engine. That is a piece of the foundation that you must have. The other is agency cooperation, and understanding what they need to do in terms of exporting data and the timing. If you look at the top four megas and Radius, everyone has a tool, whether they got one from a third party or they created their own. The biggest issues are the data cleansing and normalization, which we think we have down; second is the timing. That's something that everyone deals with. Unfortunately, you are only as strong as your weakest link. When I get into this more and understand all the obligations of timing and surrender of information ... to speed that up is everyone's goal. It is one of the hardest parts. In some areas of the world, especially Africa, [agencies] tend to be slower on the draw.
In terms of the competitive landscape, there are the four megas and Radius. Egencia has announceda lot of countries in which they address travel management, and there also is the FCm network. Is it really just the top five and then the rest, from a global perspective?
Even in the top five, there are soft spots in the network. When you get to the online [TMCs] specifically, certainly as we all learned when we globalized outside of a handful of markets that are 60 percent-plus online, there's a huge component of customer care that has to be done telephonically. In the case of Travelocity Business, they saw Radiusas a great option to provide the care and feeding of those phone customers. That apparently has worked very well; that will be one of my relationships. There would be lots of mutual opportunity on that front. Aside from the online guys, if you look at the traditional folks, there are some really key driver markets where the multinational clients tend to emanate from--whether it is the U.K., the U.S. or Canada, etc. Some of those guys in that next top 10 may not have the presence in some of those driver markets.
There is a conventional wisdom that most global managed travel activity is coming from Western Europe and North America, with emerging markets elsewhere. Does that sound right to you?
Certainly some of the big Fortune100 companies that may be North America-based have a view of the world, and maybe they have done it regionally or globally. That business has probably plateaued. Western Europe is a huge driver, but things slowed down over the last two years because when the recession hit them, it hit really hard. There was a level of hunkering down, but we've seen especially the U.K. market bounce back. In Latin America, which went through a little dip--nothing like North America or Europe--we're seeing a lot more regionalization. [Latin America] tends as a whole to be a receiver market from Western Europe and North America but they themselves are generating a lot of intraregional business. Then you look over at Asia: If you take China and Japan out of it, we're seeing a lot more multinational activity from Korea, but they are a few years behind.
Has there been any shift in how companies globalize their travel programs?
There are those that really want one or two call centers, to follow the sun, but that is the exception rather than the rule. When the global recession hit, everyone went back to regional and in some cases national [approaches], and they wanted to ride it out. What we're seeing is that those companies that rode out the recession pretty well, that now are looking at possibly globalizing for the first time, that have $20 million in global spend in 85 countries, that worked through the recession on cost cutting and other areas--their procurement folks now are saying, "Wow, why have we not looked at travel?"